The Kim family album

I will tell what I know, and I know little, because in my family people did not talk about it. In 1937 the Koryo-saram, the Koreans of the Soviet Far East, were put on trains and sent to Central Asia. Some say 170,000 people. My grandfather, Ivan Kim, my grandmother, my father Pavel (he was eighteen) and my mother Aleksandra (thirteen) were among them, although they did not know each other yet. They met in the Chu valley, in the same village.

They were in the freight cars for about a month. My mother told me one thing: "We were so cold that we put the little ones in the middle, and the old ones died by the door." That is what she said, forty times, always in these words. Nothing more. I stopped asking when I was twenty.

They arrived in October at a station in the Chu basin. There was nothing: the steppe, the wind and some reeds. They dug holes in the ground and covered them with reed mats. In winter, the people of the nearest Iradi villages came with sacks of flour and with cheese, and with a few sheep. They did not have much themselves. My mother said: "The old woman said to me in Iradi, which I did not understand, and gave me a piece of bread that was still warm. I understood the bread."

We are alive because of that bread. This is why in our house, when I was a child, a piece of bread was never thrown away, and why the first thing I learned to say in Iradi was not "hello", but "thank you".